Here come the robots?

While the rumoured AI takeover of economic life may be far fetched for technological reasons, there are also serious political and social problems limiting just how such an elite project could operate: capital needs consumers, consumers need wages.

Flickr/Kyle Saric. Some rights reserved.

Criticism of Silicon Valley's
blueprint for a future society has begun to gather some momentum over the last
couple of years. Privacy of communications is still perhaps the biggest source
of public concern, along with cybercrime and the security of online shopping
and banking, but questions about automation and its effect upon employment are
now starting to be raised too. This is a concern that resurfaces periodically
with every major wave of technical innovation.

In the 1960s the prospect of the abolition of work by automated machinery could
still be treated as a utopian goal by groups like the Situationist
International: back then trade unions were sufficiently strong that it was
taken for granted that wages could be maintained as working hours shrank. The
neoliberal reversal of the last 30 years has ensured that labour lacks any such
power nowadays (if it ever had it). The matter cropped up again in the early
1980s when it looked as though the personal computer "revolution"
might do away with millions of white collar jobs, but that turned out to be a
false alarm too. In fact PC operating systems and application programs were so
primitive and unreliable that many new jobs had to be created in IT departments
tasked with trying to keep them all running.

The latest version of this problem is being raised just now, thanks to dramatic
advances in robots controlled by AI ("artificial intelligence")
software. Google's driverless car is one uncanny example, and the giant online
retailer Amazon has been rumbling about employing pilotless aerial drones to
deliver ordered goods to customers. It seems extremely unlikely that the powers
who control airspace will permit this any time soon, but Amazon more
realistically talks about AI-driven automation of the location and retrieval of
inventory in its chain of huge warehouses, which poses a genuine threat to jobs
that are already scandalously underpaid. In a recent interview with the online magazine Slate, Professor Andrew
McAfee, a research scientist at MIT's Center for Digital Business, was asked by
interviewer Niall Firth "Are robots really taking our jobs?" and he
replied by offering these three alternative scenarios:

Robots will take away jobs
in the short term, but more will be created and a new equilibrium reached,
as after the first Industrial Revolution

Robots will replace more
and more professions and massive retraining will be essential to keep up
employment

The sci-fi-horror scenario
in which robots can perform almost all jobs and "you just won't need
a lot of labour"

McAfee believes that we'll see scenario three in his
lifetime.

When asked further about any possible upside to this automation process, McAfee
described the "bounty" he saw arising as a greater variety of stuff
of higher quality at lower prices, and most importantly "you don't need
money to buy access to Instagram, Facebook or Wikipedia". One doesn't need
to have actually read Keynes to recognise that though McAfee might know a lot
about robotics, his grasp of political economy is rather weaker. If employers
"just won't need a lot of labour" then they just won't need to pay a
lot of wages either, unless forced to do so by some agency whose identity is
very far from obvious right now. If no-one outside that fraction of a percent
of the population who own the robots has money to spend on food or housing,
then the prospect of free access to Instagram and Facebook is unlikely to
appease them very much. It's entirely possible that they will employ their
spiffy new 3D printers to reconstruct Madame Guillotine, and Prof McAfee might
perhaps be misremembered as a 21st-century Marie Antoinette for that line.

This blindness to the political - perhaps the most important victory the
neoliberal ascendancy has achieved - is amplified a thousand-fold in a survey
conducted at the start of 2014 by the US Elon University and Pew Internet
Project, in which 1,896 highly-qualified practitioners in the fields of AI,
robotics and networks were asked to comment on this question of job loss. One
of the survey questions asked respondents to share their answer to the following
query:

"Self-driving cars, intelligent digital agents that can
act for you, and robots are advancing rapidly. Will networked, automated,
artificial intelligence (AI) applications and robotic devices have displaced
more jobs than they have created by 2025? Describe your expectation about the
degree to which robots, digital agents, and AI tools will have disrupted white
collar and blue collar jobs by 2025 and the social consequences emerging from
that."

Respondents were fairly evenly split between three scenarios
similar to those that McAfee proposed, and I was fairly unsurprised by the lack
of any mention of real politics by any of them. I searched the summary of the survey results, to discover only a single
occurrence of the word "politics". To be sure there were 20
occurrences of the word "political", but most of those instances
conformed to a similar, vague template, something like:

"...our political and economic institutions are not
prepared to handle..."
"...economic, political, and social concerns will prevent the widespread
displacement of jobs..."
"...humans are in control of the political, social, and economic systems
that will ultimately determine..."
"...unemployment should be addressed primarily by creating a smarter
political system that serves the citizenry..."

These really are little more than pieties: mustn't appear
too technologically deterministic, ought to mention social effects, there...
done. Among this stratum of techno-utopians actual politics is regarded as
something rather old-fashioned that happened before social networking, a type
of natural disaster that only re-emerges at times of social breakdown (and some
of them are of course actively engaged in deploying the new technologies to
suppress dissent under those circumstances). If McAfee's third scenario were to
come about it would certainly generate a faster rise in inequality even than at
present—even than that envisaged by Thomas Piketty—and it would be likely to
precipitate some sort of social breakdown. The question is, what sort of
breakdown?

If the notorious 1%, the rentier class and their heirs, did end up with more or
less all the money and all the property, what kind of economic model could they
operate? Not even the most pony-tailed of tech-utopians believes that robots
will be able to design themselves by 2025, and so a tech-elite will
still be required to do that job. Here Slavoj Zizek's notion of the
"surplus wage" comes in handy once again: the owning class can pay
very generous salaries to those people who invent the robots for them, and
those who work on their fabrication. Such a surplus wage, one not directly
related to productivity, can always be withdrawn to suppress dissent, making
membership of the tech-elite into a sort of lifeboat, with a queue of people
waiting for your seat if you should stumble. (That implies that some degree of
technical education must be retained to keep the queue full).

This wouldn't be an entirely unprecedented state of affairs as something quite
like it already prevails in the popular entertainment business—movies, TV,
music—at all levels below that handful of top stars who can extract enough to
set up as producers themselves. Under such a model any resurrection of a labour
movement and trade union power becomes all but impossible, since people who
have neither jobs nor workplaces can't easily unionise, even if there were a
will in the Labour or Democratic parties to reform anti-union legislation
(which there isn't). For the same reasons any revival of Leninist/Bolshevik
communism is improbable—no workplaces to organise in—while anarchist/mutualist
movements like Occupy similarly lack any purchase on the real economy, as well
as any adequate source of funding.

The most likely scenario would be the emergence of some kind of new Jacobins,
renegade members of the privileged tech-elite who stir up and manipulate mobs
of the unemployed to attack the rentier elite. The US Tea Party already
displays many characteristics of such a movement (it would need to turn against
its Koch brother backers, but such about-faces aren't uncommon in the history
of right-wing extremism). Putin's FSB-oligarch state has some of the right
stuff too. In China
such renegade factions already pose a threat to the ruling party, as recent purges of Bo Xilai and Zhou Yongkang suggest. A
succession of such revolts would install more or less identically impotent
juntas, who might persecute and expropriate the super-rich for their own gain
but fail entirely to restore employment (a bit like Argentina then). Fairly quickly the
capacity to conduct advanced electronics research would be eroded and the robot
age would grind to a rusty halt.

Personally I doubt that McAfee is right about his third scenario, not because
large corporations lack the will to throw most of us out of work (they do not)
but because the abilities of AI have always been hyped way beyond the reality,
in order to extract grants from ignorant and gullible politicians. Everyone
forgets that the fighting drones which the USA
wields to such devastating effect in Afghanistan
and Pakistan
are controlled by people, not by AI computers. The Russians have just
announced an autonomous war robot, a small armoured car on caterpillar tracks
equipped with a radar-, camera- and laser-controlled 12.7mm heavy machine gun.
It's being deployed to guard missile sites and will open fire if it sees
someone it doesn't like the look of. Now there's an IT department I wouldn't
want to work in...

Nevertheless such speculations are far from useless. Like the climate change
debate, they concentrate minds on what a short time window we have to prevent
such horrible future outcomes. Preserving incomes at the cost of profits is a
matter for politics, and for unfashionable class politics at that. We
need to be inventing and researching a swathe of new policies, from John
Lewis-style mutual ownership, through universal basic incomes or negative taxes
to job shares and reduced working weeks, that might gain electoral appeal if
McAfee's second scenario turns out to be the more likely.

This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 licence.
If you have any queries about republishing please contact us.
Please check individual images for licensing details.

Recent comments

openDemocracy is an independent, non-profit global media outlet, covering world affairs, ideas and culture, which seeks to challenge power and encourage democratic debate across the world. We publish high-quality investigative reporting and analysis; we train and mentor journalists and wider civil society; we publish in Russian, Arabic, Spanish and Portuguese and English.